Hand-written manuscript of Commuter
James Belflower is the author of Commuter (Instance Press) and And Also a Fountain, (NeOpepper Press) a collaborative echap with Anne Heide and J. Michael Martinez. Commuter was recently voted 2009’s “Best Book Length Long Poem/Sequence” by ColdFront magazine. His work appears, or is forthcoming in: EOAGH, Denver Quarterly, Apostrophe Cast & Greatcoat among others. He curates PotLatchpoetry.org, a website dedicated to the gifting & exchange of poetry resources.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
Your collection, Commuter is a poetry of urban disaster, or more specifically, the detonation of a terrorist bomb—essentially, the poetry of an event. What do you think is the influence of 9/11 and the “War on Terrorism” and methods of contemporary warfare on language? On art’s concerns with consciousness? Do you think violence changes how we shape our questions about beauty?
I like your description of Commuter as “a poetry of an event.” I wonder if it might be even more accurate to describe it as a poetry of event. In this case, the event is the dissolution, dislocation and withdrawal—coexistent with the rethinking, rewriting and (re)witnessing of a rapidly changing sense of what constitutes relation and to a broader extent, community. Commuter attempts to (as you suggest below in some cases “aggressively”), enact an event of discourse and relation in this intersection. A discourse that resists the logic that results in the community of death created by and around suicide bombing.
I think this logic is very common though, and in many instances a symptom of the practice of poetry of witness (and arguably of poetry in general). So, the other primary concern was refusing this thinking. In many cases poetry of witness, and especially poetry of secondary witness, presumes to be a vehicle for the unspeakable, the testimony of those who are silenced. Yet, this logic is a means to an end, almost always that end is the “project,” the communion with another, the making meaning out of what I believe is ultimately utterly meaningless: death. In instrumentalizing another’s death, a text entertains a conception of community similar to that of suicide bombing, both constituted on the value of another’s death: the justification, defense, and potential of death. In one case metaphoric, in another martyrdom.
These logic systems center an understanding of communal structures in an originary essentialist past that only needs to be reconstituted through fusion with another for success. They suggest community as a product. As such, these systems no longer contain the possibility for the “eventness” necessitated by the limit(s) that a community is. Expanding on Maurice Blanchot, Jean Luc-Nancy calls it an “unworking” of community. I’ll quote him so I don’t botch it too badly, “that community, in its infinite resistance to everything that would bring it to completion signifies an irrepressible political exigency, and that this exigency in its turn demands something of ‘literature,’ the inscription of our infinite resistance.”
To make a long answer longer, but hopefully to answer your question, this exigency and “infinite resistance” must reshape our questions about beauty. In the pressurized space of a tradition that attempts to situate the beautiful (especially in poetry of witness) on an “authentic” subjectivity, the space for a rearticulation of beauty, much less of trauma is very limited. I personally have a very fraught relationship to beauty, in many cases finding it to be a default aesthetic mode for much poetic witness: when the trauma gets tough, the trauma turns beautiful. It seems that poetry of witness generally doesn’t interrogate the implications of beautifying atrocity very often, usually relying instead on an empathetic response that has strong affinities with the sentimental tradition. This understanding of beauty is unable to account for the unnerving experience of such works as Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust, Charlotte Delbo’s trilogy Auschwitz and After, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Rachel Zolf’s The Neighbour Procedure or Vanessa Place’s, The Guilt Project, much less the events that these texts strive to express.
So a main question for me became, how to think/write with the full awareness of my own complicity in all of these issues, what Nancy calls a “literary communism.” I like the emphasis he places on the idea of offering texts to communication, a certain manner of sharing that the text enters. What is important to this idea is abandonment. In offering something, you abandon it at the same time. Commuter seeks to populate this limit. In some sense this extends to a certain description of thinking as care for another: the offering/abandonment of a text in/as an uncrossable threshold, where the text becomes, not exactly a common ground, but a meeting place nonetheless. And the process of the work changes then, it commutes, (especially in the sense of a traveler, and the alteration of a period of imprisonment) a discourse as part of a communal formation: it is preoccupied with the unending travel(er) of/on communication.
The Prologue locates us in the chaos, panic and fragmentation of a destroyed urban space. There are people “combing hospitals,” architecture goes rickety, time is being counted and noted—these elements of a walk through the city, architecture, and time are all hallmarks of surrealism and the New York schools of poetry. How influenced are you by surrealist poets and/or NY school poets?
Well, you caught me; I do absolutely love Frank O’Hara. That being said, my concern about reading the book as surrealist would be surrealism’s emphasis on irrationality, or nonrationality that seem like a less than rigorous response to the horrors that took place in reality, and their eventness in Commuter. As I mentioned above, emulating purely rational thinking also doesn’t seem to be the answer. Perhaps there are alternatives?
As I think your question indicates, surrealist logic on one level could account for Commuter in some ways, and they both use similar techniques. It is, in a certain sense about someone shooting a revolver into a crowd. However, in response to the seeming irrationality, or dream like quality of the events there is a care for the reader and victim, an attempt to come alongside, to meet him or her in the event(s) of witnessing writing/trauma that is ongoing.
This question comes to a head in the work on page 73 where I insist that these events were not hallucinations and ask the reader to write paragraphs containing certain words having to do with dream narrative and such.
My other concern was a refusal of the solipsistic and ironic positions that preoccupy much of the pseudo-surrealist poetry that has been very popular for awhile now.
It may be a more helpful framework to consider these themes through the context of the Situationist International, specifically their ideas of psychogeography and the dérive. Debord’s description of the dérive is a very accurate description of Commuter: “a technique of rapid passages through varied ambiences.”
The work slips between what sounds like journalistic reporting and broken, breathy poetry. What is the relationship between poetry and “reporting” on the world?
“Breathy,” hmm… I can see where you could say that. I was thinking more of an out-of-breathness, rather than breathy poetry, since you mention its brokenness also. I was reading Kenneth Patchen’s Panels for the Walls of Heaven recently and was struck by his long, long, extended and barreling lines that forced the reader to alter his/her breathing. It was as if Patchen’s thought accumulated at a different speed than the readers breathing rhythm. As a result, I could no longer breath where I wanted to. This became integral to the project because, for me, the extension, or overextension of the breath mimicked the incommunicability of many of the traumatic events in the work. Altering your breathing pattern causes you to become immediately conscious of it. As awareness of breathing enters thought, it becomes irregular: how many times have you tripped over your breathing the moment you thought about it? In some sense, this is comparable to the way that you become conscious of another person. There is a sensing of patterns, which at the same time, disrupts those patterns. He/she has been there all the time but an alteration on your part causes you to listen differently. I think the differences you’ve pointed to speak to this very well. It is about the passage between very different conversations, in this case poetry and reporting, that (like the breath) only interrupt our awareness when they are disrupted. Considering their proximity on the page, it becomes necessary to continue that interruption/passage, rather than end its relationship.
- NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! is an amazing example of this (dis)embodiment, showing the limits of the breath. She splits words across the page, but maintains a narrative, so that as you’re reading, your sense-making is completely at odds with your breathing and is spaced very differently than you’re accustomed to. It’s a wonderful technique and complicates a simplistic embodiment of the work.
Given that this work places a heavy emphasis on the materiality of the page as well as how the work is performed/experienced, where/when do you locate the event of poetry itself?
Primarily in interruption and failure. I think poetry has the capacity to interrupt first its own mythologies/ideologies and to a broader extent, the mythologies/ideologies that govern much language usage and thinking today.
I view Commuter first and foremost as a process, but this process is one of perpetual interruption: of itself, of events, of thought process, of reader expectation and writing. In this case, it is an interruption of a signifying practice that locates the possibility of the representation of trauma through language, especially one based on an “empathetic” stance that attempts to understand the other through a recognition of similar experience: you’re human, I’m human, therefore I understand what you’re going through.
However, something I consistently grapple with is how to relate motile process to what seems to be the utter stasis of death. Is there relation of a different sort here, and if so, how can one write this relation? In some sense, it returns to the question of community. If our access to the other is through death, then what manner of access is this?
As far as failure is concerned the book purposely foregrounds its failure to “represent” trauma and all its effects through language. However, it is this failure, or the continuous contention with this failure, that generates and supports the community I’m suggesting and places a large responsibility on the reader as a member of this community. To be more specific, the book’s response to atrocity is to precisely fail to reconcile it metaphorically or otherwise, (and therefore reduce) a certain usage of trauma by language: a (re)production of trauma through a certain logic of expression. I’m always hesitant to suggest that trauma can be cast into (a) language, or should be for that matter, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be written.
The book practices a thinking that envisions witnessing as an awareness of singular events in contact, not in communion: whether these events are love, atrocity or anything in between. In some sense a thinking in contradictions, rather than through them. I don’t mean to suggest that relation isn’t happening but it is a relation supported only by this incessant “communication.” And this communication is in the form of an interruption of the assumption that we are fully sharing, to the point of knowing, another’s experience. In some sense it is a contact with the limit that is/is not another’s singularity. This is why I keep insisting on the importance of the reader to Commuter. He/she is vital to the social process that is the work. The reader is the 3rd “witness.” In that sense, if a reader is contacted, perhaps the work fails very differently!
After the Prologue—which sounds more journalistic than poetic—Commuter opens with a poem that is essentially instructions for constructing a bomb, and thus the poem becomes not the event but the ignition of an event. There are many things I could say about the idea of a poem-as-detonator but I’d like to start with a metaphysical question about the relationship between events and language: to your mind, does language call events and organized chaos into being or into our awareness of being? Or is language simply a naming system to describe what already is? Is this tension a major concern of your poetry?
I love your distinction between the poem as event and the poem as ignition of an event. I think that this difference is very important for Commuter.
The short answer is yes; this tension is a major concern. I would have to say that I think language names, or more precisely delimits—the unnamable, or for language in general the first order, or to use a risky word, the unconscious. For me, language exposes a threshold. It (de)limits, or chalks communication. In Commuter the relational abundance of “it” speaks to your question. As I’m sure you noticed “it” refers to and can be substituted for any number of referents, signs/signifiers. “It” is a person, a helicopter, a currency etc. So this “name” at once, “calls” events into occurrence and at the same time serves as a threshold, or chalk line, albeit a loose (and in this case jarred loose) one, for event(s). These aren’t necessarily traumatic events but trauma usually communicates these limits more clearly than other discourses. But here is the challenge: part of the project was to activate, or as you put it, ignite this abundance, to write in a way that precisely emphasized the potential of the word, prior to its manifestation as a threshold. What I was in part, trying to touch upon was what Deleuze calls “order-words.” Words that relate to and ignite implicit presuppositions in the reader. In some sense, this confronted the impossibility of communicating my own, and another’s mortality through this precise failure to situate, or name, in the sense of commune with, understand, or essentialize identities within the poem. The radically provisional quality of these order words, whether they are more associated with discourses of trauma, another person, a lover, or quotidian life, also abundantly “name” various other events for the author, victim and reader. This abundance necessitates similar event of the crises of naming on the part of the reader.
MacLow’s idea of “controlled hysteria” is important here also. He mentions the features of this hysteria as barely controlled emotional outbursts, sometimes appearing aggressive or angry. What is most important to Commuter though is his last feature, suspense. In an analogy to the order word, the reader senses that this outburst is almost uncontrollable, it appears at its limit of containment, it’s suspended, or as we said above, it delimits the event. Interestingly enough he calls it a very “theatrical” experience.
The language of Commuter is both expressive of empathy for those who are victims of terrorism and is highly descriptive of violence—balancing both extremes while managing to produce quite beautiful phrasing. When writing Commuter, did you have ethical concerns about working the event of trauma into the texture of poetic beauty?
I’m hoping that this question is in part answered by your question about rethinking beauty. But to expand on it more, yes, absolutely I have ethical concerns. One of the biggest challenges for me is the risk and implications involved in secondary witnessing. Although I’m as unsure as I am convinced that it is necessary, it is an incredibly provisional practice. One idea that bothered me was that in the context of witnessing, received semiotic use becomes especially problematic in the representation of another. That is the reason for many of the crossed out words, which also equate this problematic mythology/ideology of beauty with the equally problematic mythology/ideology associated with the romanticization of the femme fatale.
I’ll return to this idea of infinite resistance also. As far as an ethics of this text is concerned, I would argue that this resistance translates to the reader through the author. First in the reader’s experience of the author’s fragmentary responses, and secondly in his initial inclination (and the author’s) to combine or fuse these events. Both of these events are results of a reader’s reading habits, especially combined with the expectations of poetry that deals with atrocity. So this infinite resistance begins in the text and continues into the reader, who as a 3rd party, is asked to participate in the writing of the text itself. Though the reader’s relationship to the text changes, the suspension of his/her ability to connect or link events in the text becomes the primary mode of relation within the text. Sometimes forcefully, the reader is asked to share, to communicate (in) this suspension, to both found and be complicit in this “community.” He or she is asked to be unsuitable to “witness” the author’s inability to witness/commune with these events, to come alongside him and to distribute these events in an unsuitable semantic system.
In addition to gaps in the page, gaps between words, partially erased words, lines stricken-through, there is a brokenness or disjoint or strangeness between how subjects and objects relate in the post-bomb language of Commuter. For example, on page 60 are the lines, “clearer to / frame you / behind the reason / I fisted a door?” I’m not sure whether “fisted a door” is just an odd , condensed way to say something synonymous along the lines of, “I put my fist through a door,” as an expression of violence or anger, or whether it’s intended to reference the extreme sexual practice of “fisting” (which would be surrealist—essentially, sadomasochistic sex with architecture—which is sort of incredible as imagery of terrorism). I interpret that it is the double-entendre that is important here as shards of phrasing and syntax reform to make a new, odd, off-ish sense of each other. Why does the fragmentary, disoriented (but still precise) language of trauma belong in the realm of poetry for you?
I think it’s Kristeva who says it and her description applies very well here. She says that process as practice is always an extreme moment. Language is/as a form of violence . . . Blanchot even suggests that it is a form of terrorism. I’m not sure these are answers to your questions but I think they provide a framework for the phrase you excerpted. I’ll also have to refer to the interruption, or disruption we talked about earlier.
I like your reading of this very much and yes, as a short answer it is about that odd-offish sense. Part of the strangeness of this figuration comes from thinking of the practice of poetry of witness as a masochistic act, understood as very different from a sadomasochistic one. I’m working on a paper now that analogizes the process of poetry of witness with a masochistic relationship: it relies on a certain power dynamic between pain and/or trauma to the author: specifically on the generally expunged element of desire combined with the illusion of the (author’s) powerlessness, in the aesthetization of traumatic events. But this recognition of the power structures in a masochistic relation also provides great potential for rethinking identity formation, community and sexual politics.
The work is aggressive, most obviously in the directions to the performer that are scattered through the pages. I admit I felt even a bit uncomfortable when I encountered the list of immediate family and close friends on page 40 with the footnote instructing the reader to cross-out those names and replace with others. How much is this about subjecting the reader to a kind of objectification or about making the reader complicit in the activity of the poetry?
I’m so excited you felt uncomfortable! What a huge compliment! I also hoping that you felt invited, to be a part of the text, to perform it. I would say it is both of these things: complicity, which we discussed beforehand, extends to the author as well as the performer. I’ve called them the reader in this interview but you bring up the very important distinction Commuter makes: that of the “performer” as reader. At a very basic level I think this contributes to both the feelings of aggressivity and complicity you noticed, since a reader is not usually accustomed to thinking of the public connotations of him/herself performing a text, in both public and private.
I think to a degree a feeling of objectification is a helpful response to the piece and may indicate the tension within an artwork that Adorno speaks to. However, though objectification may initially be a part of it, I would hope that the extensive questions and invitations to perform, both sustain and recombinate this feeling of objectification with others. Part of that feeling as you said earlier, is that subject/object distinctions seemed to be rather difficult to pinpoint. Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz discusses the etymology of the word witness and describes one definition as a figure in the position of a 3rd party, someone who for other reasons than trauma, also cannot bear witness. This is where the possibility of secondary or proxy witness appears although it is a highly unstable position.
The juxtapositional quality of the text places the reader in this third position. So, in effect, the reader “witnesses” or dérives the process of both secondary and firsthand witnessing. So to feel uncomfortable here, I think, is a very warranted initial response. Hopefully, as the book encourages relation (as you’ve pointed to), it also initiates other involvement on the part of the reader, namely the ethical tension that their rotating position of witness, secondary witness and objectified other, elicits. Since these positions do not tend toward reconciliation within or outside of the work the reader must persistently contend with them all.
Blazer’s comment about making the poem into “a necessary function of the real, not something added to it” is very important for this involvement.
When I saw you read at the Dikeou Collection a couple summers ago, you used a white noise machine in the background of your reading. Does poetic language ride the white noise? Or rise out of the white noise? Or, as a poet, do you listen into the white noise?
I love drone/noise music, Spaceman 3, Noveller, Skullflower, E.A.R., Kites, Steve Roach, William Basinski, etc. For that project, tentatively titled The Poster of Contour, or 0, (Zero comma) I am experimenting with noise, or more specifically drone, as a platform for the performance of the piece. The work takes vacuums/vacuuming/vacuity and fluid dynamics as primary themes and so the idea of a droned tone as a vacuum, or fluidity allows for a certain affirmative quality to the historically abhorred natural “vacuum.” The idea in part stems from Berio’s Oboe Sequenza. What amazed me about the piece was the droned B that, as the piece progressed, and the oboe counterpointed against the drone, it began to both collapse the piece into an imaginary horizontal line that extended out from its source, and yet at the same time, it filled the room to the point of almost a visual throbbing. It seemed that a vacuum of sorts was created, but one that was fully empty. The oboe counterpoint became a sort of supplement, to this absence, like the language of the poem around a certain immaterial space. Many of Varese’s pieces have a similar visual/auditory effect on me. I guess it is similar to Scriabin’s synesthesia. Is there a specific name for that? The sequenza is fantastic, especially performed live.
In answer to your question, I think it’s both; language both rides and rises out of noise. It’s information theory at it’s most basic, noise coexists with language, music etc. For that performance, I also “listened into” the noise: the tone that droned through the piece was my normal speaking voice, which happens to be approximately an F#. I tried to keep that pitch for many of the sections dealing with vacuums.
What forthcoming projects do we have to look forward to?
At this point, I have two main projects I’m working on, besides my dissertation. One, Friend of Mies Van der Rohe rethinks Heidegger’s concept of dwelling through Philip Johnson’s Glass House. The other, tentatively titled The Posture of Contour, or 0, (Zero Comma) explores those strange registers between the performance qualities of a lecture, a poem and conversation in a David Antin style. There are some wonderful expectations to be disrupted in the contrasts of these genres.
“Christo” from IS IT ART OR FART? blog
Anonymously authored blog-to-book Is is Art or Fart? features snapshots of everyday objects that, in the eyes of the authors, resemble works by contemporary artists. Nobody is safe, even their recognized forefather—Duchamp (posted Sept. 8, 2010). Is it Art or Fart? sends up contemporary art—or does it?
Interview by Brandon Johnson
In the prologue to Is it Art of Fart, “fart” is described as “coincidental moments in everyday life that, when isolated and named by artist, bear uncanny resemblance to art seen in museums and galleries around the globe. Why is it called “fart”?
Art has aura. Farts, as we like to call them, do not. From certain angles or upon first glance, farts might appear auric—but this false or temporary aura quickly dissipates like a passing gas.
Lifted from Wikipedia: In parapsychology and many forms of spiritual practice, an aura is a field of subtle, luminous radiation supposedly surrounding a person or object (like the halo or aureola in religious art). The depiction of such an aura often connotes a person of particular power or holiness.” What do you mean by “aura”? Is art “holy”? Is fart “profane? (Side-note “In Iran the aura is known as farr or ‘glory’”)
Yes, art objects are often treated and revered as special, valuable, holy objects. This is a property of Art that the Roman Catholic Church, the forces of Modernism, and the Contemporary Art Market have all, at different points in Western Art History, desired and worked to uphold. Fart is not art. It’s not profane, nor is it pagan; It is simply a part of regular, everyday, pedestrian life.
I was trying to figure out how this book fits into the grand scheme. At first I thought along the lines of artists as brands, a somewhat cynical/critical approach, but didn’t really see that edge after a second look. Now, I’ve decided it’s more linguistic—a rhyming of objects. The photographed images rhyme with the work they are being identified with in the same way as “fart” rhymes with “art”. What do you think of this theory?
Well, certainly rhyming has something to do with pop music—and pop music is readily accessible and gaseous ether that circulates through contemporary urban life. What we mean to say is that the book is about art-in-popular-life. We are truly indebted to the enduring power of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades—those dramatic gestures that bridged the gap between art and everyday life.
Are there special Duchampian glasses one can wear to gain “fart” vision?
No, not really. Recognizing farts is an uncontrollable phenomenon. It just happens.
Does this book “stick it to” the art world?
There are so many art worlds. The book likely stinks to some of them.
Have any artists voiced offense at this book?
Actually, a few very well-known artists have mentioned their disappointment over not being included!
Blog: http://isitartorfart.blogspot.com/
Laird Hunt’s fiction is some of the best stuff around. Weird, lyrical, mysterious, funny, gritty, and more, it’s the type of work that makes you want to devote your life to literature. His fourth book, Ray of the Star (Coffee House Press 2009), follows in the line of his previous brilliant noiresque novels The Exquisite and The Impossibly , but also integrates the haunting memory-based emotional depth found in Indiana, Indiana. Ray of the Star follows grief-addled Harry Tichborne in a vacant escape from an unnamed family tragedy to a European city on the sea very much like Barcelona. His life proceeds to delve into a series of strange events involving a large yellow papier-mache submarine, talking shoes, a silver painted love-interest, lectures on death by ghosts, and a trio of sinister old men called the Connoisseurs as the mood of the novel sways from interminable grief to light slapstick, dense mystery to vague horror. As a former student of Laird’s at the University of Denver, I am extremely pleased to have the opportunity to interview him.
Interview by Brandon Johnson
Your new novel, Ray of the Star, again falls on the side of noir. What draws you to this genre?
I actually wrote it thinking I was more involved with ghosts and ghost stories than noir, but I certainly know what you mean. Maybe what I’m interested in in the kind of off-noir or noiresque that I’ve practiced over the years is the possibility of genre blending. Noir in this case (and maybe in the case of The Impossibly) blended with the fantastic. If you agree with Brian McHale and others that detective stories and spy novels are epistemological beasts, in which knowing—both what and how we know—is key, and that fantasy and science fiction are ontological animals, in which being rather than knowing gets center stage, then an effective blending of the two genres results in the kind of knowing/being combine that might, it seems to me, actually rhyme with the universe as we experience (rather than tend to represent) it.
Each chapter consists of a single sentence. What made you decide to use this constraint?
Friedrich Dürrenmatt uses this constraint in his novel The Assignment. I came across it and was interested in how energetically he applied his mechanism and in how appropriate it was for the murder mystery he was developing. I put his book down after a few chapters (sentences) and filed the device away. Then I had this thought of writing about someone trapped in almost inconceivable grief. Ordinary length sentences didn’t seem long enough. I needed the sentence to be longer, but not languorous, not ambling, agglutinative things. So I thought again of Dürrenmatt and brought what I remembered of the way he made his long sentences rush to the work I was envisaging. Being stuck in long sentences, one after the other, is a nightmare. Harry is like some underwater swimmer who can only come up for breath momentarily for fear that bullets or arrows will hit him.
This novel deals with trauma and making sense of death. Senor Rubinski’s explanation of “drippings” reminded me of Flann O’Brien characterization of death in The Third Policeman as absurdity explained rationally. Do you feel that there is a certain absurdity to conceptualizing death that can be exemplified in literature?
This makes me think of the image of the semiotic square—that nifty diagram that proposes that when we assert something (white) we invoke its opposite (black), but also all the things it isn’t (not white) and all the things its opposite isn’t (not black). So that when I wrote “knowing/being” above, “not knowing/not being” came into the room. Writing is rather mediocre at describing or representing death but I think it can be extraordinarily powerful in evoking it. Or, to borrow the word you use above, exemplifying it. We’re just starting to tackle the concept of dark matter in science. I think writers have been working with it for centuries.
Not to choose favorites, but my favorites were the Connoisseurs. They were menacing yet funny. I had a laugh reading various labels placed on them by reviewers such as “wise-ass noir goons” by James Gibbons in Bookforum. Could you share your feelings on them?
Ah, yes, those guys. I had tremendous fun trying to keep them under control as I wrote because of course they want everything, all of it. Why, they kept seeming to ask, is this Harry’s story at all: tell our story: make us the center of it: etc. They were so insistent, in fact, that after having been two for a long time, they became three. Three points to the infinite better than two, it seems to me. Perhaps in the way that, as Borges liked to say, 1001 (nights) points at the infinite better than 1000. They were definitely a handful. You don’t want to try to argue with them. Or, for that matter, have them emerging from your head.
Something I’ve noticed in more than one of your novels is the presence of food. Characters eat and what they eat is particular and described; in the case of Ray of the Star, large amounts of sparkling water and various sea-born delicacies. Why all the eating?
This really started with The Impossibly. My first impulse in answering this is that my younger self was doing something more or less unconscious with all those comestibles that Hemingway describes in his stories and novels (once upon a time I read them all). Warping and troubling that desire, as he somewhere described it, to make the world seem more real in fiction than it seems outside of it (I’m currently seeing one of his famous glasses of beer, sitting next to a pretzel and sweating in the dim light of an inn in Europe somewhere). Maybe there is something to that. I’m not at all a “foodie” in the popular sense of it. To be honest I’m a little grossed out by food culture. And of course my characters eat odd foods (octopus porridge) or obsess over minor details (the glaze on a pastry) or relatively banal ones. But we’re all slung between one meal and the next. Food is the thing, isn’t it? I know my cats think so.
Each of the three sections of the novel includes a quote: I: “Now you must learn how to last”; II. “The past, since it does not exist, is hard to erase. Tears and the gnashing of teeth.”; III. “In the places / only the dead dream, I will look for our reflections.” Can you disclose the sources of these quotes? Care to release further thoughts on them?
The quote sources are cited on the copyright page. You will, I think, recognize at least one of the names: Bin Ramke. And may have run across Christina Mengert during your time at DU. Perec wrote the first one. I wanted to have it both ways with these epigraphs—to have text from elsewhere brought into the mix, but also to have a disconnect between attribution and the language I was borrowing. Put otherwise, I didn’t want people to completely leave the dream of the book as it was unfolding—to turn their thoughts both to the substance of the quote and to its author. At the same time I wanted to point people toward important writers (hence the attribution on the copyright page).
Ray of the Star was recently made a finalist for the Pen USA Literary Award for Fiction. Hunt has more books on the horizon: his first book, The Paris Stories, will be reissued by Marick Press in the Fall, Counterpath Press will be publishing his translation of Oliver Rohe’s Terrain Vague under the title Vacant Lot, and Actes Sud will be releasing The Exquisite in France. Bon appetit.
Noah Eli Gordon is the author of several books, including Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007), which was selected by John Ashbery for the 2006 National Poetry Series Open Competition and chosen for the 2007 San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award, A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues Press, 2007), and The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta Press, 2004). He’s the co-publisher of Letter Machine Editions and an Assistant Professor in the MFA program in Creative Writing at The University of Colorado–Boulder. He has a new book forthcoming from Futurepoem Books next year. Visit his PennSound page here: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Gordon-Noah-Eli.php
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
I notice a persistent gesture in your work in which poems take on the subject of music (and also emphasize musicality in the line). I believe (and perhaps I’m incorrect) that you worked at a radio station for a time and play music (or did play). What came first for you, in this life, poetry or music?
I think anyone answering this question would have to say poetry, if only in the joy and frustration that comes from hearing the sound of one’s own voice for the first time, and realizing that that sound can just as easily obscure as express whatever one is after; it’s the babble of the newborn: give me food, hold me, etc. It always points toward its intentions with a crooked arrow.
But to fast-forward a bit, the two were inexorably intertwined. Musicality is for me the foundation of the poem. Although I quit playing music in any serious way about a decade ago, I’ve been slowly finding my way back. The problem is I was never any good as a musician. I mostly played in punk and noise bands, so that didn’t seem to matter. Sure, I had heart, not much else. Recently, my wife has been teaching me to sing in key; really, just teaching me how to listen. We actually performed a song together in NYC about a month ago, a cover of Big Star’s Thirteen. I practiced singing it with her dozens of times. At the show, she ended up forgetting the chords and we did a sort of dissonant version of it. I suppose obscurity and expression come full circle.
There is frequently a line of philosophical questioning in your work related to repetition and representation. There is the texture of echo and things ricocheting but beyond that there is also a deliberate, disorienting synaesthesia that makes sound visible within a poem (“miming the music / of one digging a ditch” – from A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow) for example. Is this gesture related to a reworking of Ezra Pound’s idea that a poem is a unit composed of phanopoeia (image) and melopoeia (music)? How does repetition and echo relate to image or music, for you?
What about logopoeia? the dance of the mind around the two? For me, representation is suspect, a construct, a dream, something one can only approach, never attain. It’s like those spots in one’s vision after staring at a bright light; look directly toward them and they veer away. I admire the poem that moves askance around its subject, that circles and stalks. Repetition is one way to do this, although that too is suspect, suspect as a term. Gertrude Stein asked, “Is there repetition or is there insistence. I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition.”
I, too, am inclined to believe this Heraclitian dilemma. The river changes, context changes, even echoes are about change. As Stevens famously argued, “It must change.” And if that change includes a little disorientation, well, that works for me. I’d rather a poem lead me to bewilderment than grip my hand too tightly and tell me exactly where to go and what to do when I get there. Our literature needn’t treat us like automatons.
Music is also about the silences and this is a subject you address throughout your work. A theatre (essentially, an area for the presentation of music) caves in, there are “silent film gestures,” a handful of poems end with a sudden negation. It seems that silence is frequently where meaning erupts in a poem. Is silence something the energy of your work reaches for? Why or why not?
It’s not silence as much as it is moments of shift that I find intriguing, moments when something’s cracked, changing, aware of itself. A skipping CD, a hair in the projector. These relate to silence in the way silence allows one to hear what’s come before more fully, and to harvest attention for what’s about to happen. I’m interested in the outline of things, the wire mesh of the screen door disappearing into the view of whatever’s outside. Writing can do the same thing; it can be wholly absorptive—the words dissolving into the experience of reading—or it can shout about its own materiality. I suppose I work to allow both options simultaneous agency.
What strikes me about your innovative use of metaphorical language is how frequently it starts with the symbolic but reaches outward beyond itself into something else without context, and winds its way into another symbol. For example:
If we could use a radio to wipe out the hum of a tuning fork’s indecision about where music begins & sound just sounds, then even the staggered rhythm might catch on something less solid, closer to the core of consciousness where what’s bound to be symphony in the personal sense is our appreciation in static, laughing at private music, a station like that of the cross.
from 93.7, The Frequencies
This is not typical use of metaphor and simile. We begin with an emotional, anthropomorphized radio, work our way through a strange set of dichotomies about music (comparing the beginning of music to sound that just sounds, and comparing symphonies to personal static), then end up with the religious iconography of stations of the cross (playing on the word “station,” which in this work usually refers to a radio station). Do you have a personal, critical stance on the structure of metaphors (and/or symbols)? What is the purpose, in your view, of symbolic language in poetry?
Well, the things of the world only point to themselves; it’s we who are disposed to making them into something more. This disposition is essentially a product of language, and my only critical stance on the use of language—metaphoric, symbolic, etc.—is one of advocacy for the eradication of received ideas and orthodoxy about what a writer can do with it.
I love stretching rhetorical expectations, mixing metaphors, antiquated syntax, run-on sentences, any place that it seems the structural certainties might break open, bloom into something new and unexpected. I don’t think symbolism in poetry is all that interesting when it functions as a kind of ornate riddle studded with vacuous, filigreed synonyms. Things should correspond in a way that respects a reader’s intelligence, a way that carves out a thinking space but doesn’t demand one to blindly follow.
When I saw you read at the Dikeou Collection in the summer of 2007, you read from A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow, and you mentioned that the line, “the window shows it’s time to get up” was found text you overheard from a child. The “reverse memoir,” INBOX, is essentially all found text. Is found text a consistent technique in your work? What qualities does a found piece of text have that you decide to select it for having space in a poem?
Even if I said it, I have a problem with the phrase “found text,” as it implies a kind of haphazard, uninformed yet lucky accident. Sure, sometimes that’s the case; it certainly was with the line you quote here, which came from a six-year-old. It was striking to me in that it encapsulated a moment of language set free from codified usage. To say: “the window shows it’s time to get up” rather than “it’s morning” or “it’s light outside” is not only more raw but also, somehow, more accurate. It’s a shame we’re so quickly indoctrinated. A little continual wonder goes a long way.
That said, I wouldn’t make any distinction between something inherently poetic about sampled, appropriated, quoted, collaged, or otherwise-lifted-from-the-ether language and that which one writes in a more traditional manner. In fact, there was a time when one could make a living by reciting rearranged lines from Homer. Our use of “other” material is as old as our first makings of it. For me, it all depends on context, on the aims of a particular piece of writing. Some of my books were originally written entirely by hand on small notebooks I carry in my pocket, some were built with elaborate structural underpinnings that involved sculpting already extant text. Really, it’s about allowing myself to be forever open to change, to new techniques, to never falling into a rut. I think art is at its core a harnessing of contrasts. I mean this as much in the compositional phase as in whatever end result one is after.
A poem is a meditative thing and requires some focused attention to meaningfully read, to say nothing of the writing of poems. How do you think technology (particularly the web, Google Books, kindle) will effect the publication and dispersal of poetry? Is the book-as-object soon to be vintage? What is the significance of poetry in tangible book form? And in that same vein, how do you think the fast, flashy experience of technology changes how readers read?
I don’t necessarily agree with your initial assertion here. There are many poems interested in other modes of engagement: environmental work like Ashbery’s Three Poems, which calls for a kind of sidewise attention and would frustrate any attempt at, say, logically tracing its pronouns throughout; Tan Lin’s ambient works, which explore states of boredom and relaxation; those grand, sprawling, mid-period books by Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge, with their exhaustive attempt to get everything into the writing. In fact, sometimes I find myself more enthralled by writing that doesn’t want me to pay attention to it.
As for the other questions here, I don’t enjoy reading on the internet. If there’s an article longer than a few paragraphs, I always print it out first. For me, the book is a technological marvel that will remain valid, present, and ubiquitous. Someone gave me a kindle as a present about a year ago. It’s currently gathering dust on a shelf (and that’s only because I couldn’t figure out how to sell it).
INBOX takes on the subject of technology, blending together voices from 200 emails you had in your inbox on 9/11/2004. You essentially took private content off the Internet and recontextualized it in book form. Why did you decide that the ultimate form of the project should be in a bound book? Why not regurgitate it back onto the Internet somewhere?
See my answer above!
You’ve done several collaborations with other poets and a painter. When I saw you read in Denver from Figures for a Darkroom Voice with Joshua Marie Wilkinson, you and Joshua both said that, “Neither of you could remember who wrote what.” What is the process of writing a collaborative work? At what point, in the making of a collaboration, does ownership of a poem, or the elements in a poem, recede in importance?
Doesn’t ownership of a poem always recede? I’d hope so. Our poems leave us the moment they’re read by someone else.
The process for collaboration is always different. If you’re interested in the specifics of the book I’d done with Josh, here’s a little note on that I’d originally written for Lungfull! Magazine:
The near decade I’d spent in Northampton, MA was one rife with collaborative projects, never lacking in fellow conspirators. I think collaboration, in its ability to tout a seemingly lowered sense of individual investment in a particular work, more than anything else, allows one the comfort to take massive risks, turning one’s editing machine to idle, and, implicitly, constructing, along with whatever actual work of art, a widening of allowance as far as how one might proceeded in the future, whether alone or not. Of course, investment is hopefully there in the end, but, if one is true to the collaboration, it sneaks up, leaks in, and lords over with benevolence this beast with two fronts.
Imagine having at 50 mph to continually switch from sidecar to motorcycle during a cross-country trip. Well, it’s an image a bit more exciting than passing back and forth a small notebook while slinging back coffee and trying to ignore horrendous world music filling a café. If the poem requires a bit of pulling away from the world, then isn’t it nice to know one doesn’t have to be so damn self-obsessed to do it? Hey, if I’m going to jump off that bridge I sure hope someone’s willing to walk me through it. Don’t you feel a little awkward going to the movies alone? Anyhow, moving last year to Denver carried along with it the fear of losing simpatico compatriots willing to conquer collaborativille. Then I met Joshua Marie Wilkinson. Over the course of our first few conversations, it was clear that, as far as contemporary poetry goes, we inhabited a very small tuft of common ground. I think our aesthetic disagreements were generative, forcing us as they did to articulate to one another, as much to ourselves, why we where repelled by or responded to different works.
What we did share was the energetic motivation to continually explore poetry on all fronts, that, and a huge respect for Graham Foust’s work. It’s enough to set things in action. Figures for a Darkroom Voice began with us passing the aforementioned notebook back and forth during a plane ride, trading sentences. This was in March of 2006. Josh’s first sentence reads, “Yet, stars pull the sleep out of us.” And mine: “Intrinsically, every moving thing likes a hallway.” As we’re very different writers, it made for an interesting experience. After a few months of meeting every couple of days to pound out three or four pages of full prose, trading off sentences all the while, and accumulating 50 pages of work, we hit on a procedural breakthrough: instead of passing the notebook after writing complete sentences, we let them end mid-point, forcing us to finish, twist, or totally alter each other’s trail of thought. For example, Josh wrote: “Noise keeps coming from the red radio even after—” and I continued: “its dainty refinement orchestrated a disbelief in electricity.” Now, what was beginning to feel after a few months like a chore was again exciting.
It took us almost the entire summer to fill the notebook—100 pages of whacked-out sentences. Although, we were attune to running with each other’s imagery and ideas, often threading back into the project older elements to attempt a ghostlike narrative background. By this point, we’d clocked in hundreds of hours on the project. The looming editing process seemed massive, like a staircase requiring a ladder to ascend each step. Okay, maybe just like a really long staircase and a pair of worn-down sneakers with no traction. Whatever the (stair)case, we did have to reckon with how we were going to type the thing. If you’ve ever received a letter from me, I’m sure it’s clear how clouded my handwriting can be. We had to spend one of Denver’s late summer 100-plus degree heat waves cramped in Josh’s small office while I dictated for hours on end, him diligently typing all the while. Fully digitized, we’d float the document back and forth via email, cutting and pasting, splicing and grafting, lots of it moving toward the garbage bin. At one point we’d collectively created 20 sonnets, 80 prose poems, and about 60 pages of triadic haiku-like fragments. Arbitrarily, the decision to go for 70 pages of working material was made, and somehow it gave to the work a balance between what William James calls the substantive and the transitive; it’s all over the place, but one is able to now and again get some footing.
Tell me a bit about your forthcoming projects we have to look forward to.
I have a book coming out next year with Futurepoem Books. Early versions of some of it can be found here:
http://www.conjunctions.com/webcon/gordon10.htm
http://www.shadowboxmagazine.org/issue1/Bottle7.pdf
Here’s a brief process note about the book:
From January of 2008 to September of 2009, I read only page 26 of nearly ten thousand books at the Denver Public Library, culling from them bits of language, which I then fused together, altering some nouns to read the Source so they become reflective of the parameters of the project. At its core, the book is a prose cento, a continuation of a practice dating from the Homeric song stitchers of antiquity to current trends in hip-hop culture and electronic music; however, it’s also a testament to the interconnectedness and mutability of all writing, as well as an exploration of the notion of origins, both textual and spiritual. The choice of page 26, while obviously corresponding to the amount of letters present in the English alphabet, is also important in Kabbalist terms; it represents the numerical value of the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters that form the name of God. Additionally, according to the Talmud, the Torah would have been revealed during the 26th generation of the history of the world; thus, it is Moses who, 26 generations after Adam, receives the Torah transmitted by God. Interestingly, by using a correspondence table, where each letter is given in ascending order a numerical value (A=1, B=2, C=3, etc.), the name of God in English has a total value (G=7, O=15, D=4) of 26. The problems of numerology aside, I undertook this project in order to investigate whether or not constraint-based, conceptual writing might have a spiritual dimension. It is now my belief that rigid and systemic modes of writing can embody an emotionally charged engagement with the world.
Read a new selection from the Source here: http://www.zingmagazine.com/noaheligordon.pdf
Enoc Perez first approached us with a project during lunch at Felix on a sunny day in Soho, New York. His project, “Form by Memory,” is multimedia—with watercolors, digital photos, polaroids, sketches, photos of paintings in situ, and even drink stirrers from Puerto Rican hotels. A divergence from his architectural paintings created via brushless paint transfer, we enthusiastically accepted the project for zingmagazine #22 (due out later this year).
Interview by Brandon Johnson
What is it about architecture that interests you? Why use it as a subject for paintings?
I see buildings as metaphors, as abstractions. I like how architecture can embody ideas, “the future”, progress, enlightenment, optimism, etc. In fact it can project ideas in any direction. To paint architecture is to paint ideas. It is to paint an abstract reflection of current society.
Do certain architectural styles appeal to you more than others?
Sure I like some architecture more than others but I find that there is a lot to like. Generally I like everything from Greek Architecture to Bauhaus, Modern, International Style, Mid-Century Modern, Brutalist to Green Building. I follow my attraction, my taste is a bit promiscuous.
You’ve mentioned that there’s a utopian quality to your work—a belief in painting as opposed to questioning the medium. What, in your opinion, is the place of belief in art?
Belief is to me important in art. And I mean to believe in art. A significant part of the existence of art has to do with the artist believing in his or her art and those whom believe in the artist work. People believing in art is part of what brings art to life. My friend Tony Shafrazi once told me that art was “his religion”. I think that comment goes to the heart of what I am trying to address here. It is the trust that art can make a difference, change or improve our perception of ourselves; the trust that art is important.
Does belief extend to the viewer of art?
Of course, it is central for the viewer to be in it. It is a connection that completes the process.
I’ve been a fan since you first proposed your project over a lunch in Soho. The multi-media project seems to showcase a process rather than a product. Is this a glimpse into your painting process?
I remember the lunch and yes this project is about some aspects of my painting process. I was just giving some physicality to my thought process. When it comes to my work, I am as exited about the process as I am about the finished idea.
The drink stirrers are a great touch—they add tactile detail to the art deco modernist style you are surveying. Do you collect them?
I have a beautiful collection of drink stirrers. From all over the world, I think that I have over a thousand. I love them.
You have a series of architectural monochromes upcoming at Galerie Michael Janssen during Berlin Gallery Week. Why monochrome?
I wanted to see what I could do with a very disciplined palette. I also felt that it was important to untangle my painting process, break every rule that I had set for myself. For years I did not used brushes in the making of my paintings, the new paintings are done with brushes. I like the new work, making it has been renewing. Sometimes you have to burn your own house in order to create something new.
Anything else you have coming up / are working on that we should know about?
EP: Next year I have an exhibition in a museum in Murcia Spain called “The Cannery”. I also have gallery shows in Europe and in NY.
Enoc has new works on exhibit at Galerie Michael Janssen in Berlin through June 19.